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Tonight’s Hawks-Warriors game might be the toughest ticket in Atlanta sports history

For weeks, the Atlanta ticket market has been abuzz over a regular-season Atlanta Hawks game.

Surprising as it might be, that sentence is 100 percent true. And when the Atlanta Hawks do battle with the Golden State Warriors tonight, fans who see it in person might be able to claim that they landed the toughest ticket in Atlanta sports history.

It’s not just that the game is sold out – the Hawks have done that about a dozen times already this year. It’s how high-priced tickets have been in the secondary market.

At this writing, the cheapest ticket on StubHub is going for $88.99, plus fees. It’ll cost you $99 plus fees to buy the cheapest ticket on Ticketmaster’s Fan Exchange.

So you’re not getting into the building for cheaper than $100 tonight if you don’t already have tickets.

It’s fair to say that since 2000, the biggest sporting event that was played in the city of Atlanta, involving an Atlanta team, was the 2013 NFC Championship game between the Falcons and the San Francisco 49ers. My father and I paid $125 a ticket to sit in the upper deck for that game, but we bought the tickets from the primary market as soon as they went on sale.

I can’t vouch for the price of tickets on the secondary market leading up to that game, but in a big playoff game like that one, the threshold for spending goes up a little bit for the average fan. I’m willing to pay $125 to see (barely, from the upper deck) my team possibly clinch a trip to the Super Bowl.

Even if it’s a game between two teams that are a combined 63 games over .500, it’s hard to shell out $200 for a pair of tickets to a regular-season basketball game.

But that’s what has happened to the Hawks. Almost overnight, ticket prices have skyrocketed in the secondary market, and the city has become revitalized with a franchise that was left for dead for more than two decades.

What’s more, ticket prices for tonight’s game didn’t just suddenly shoot through the roof – they’ve been through the roof for at least two weeks. The game sold out more than a week ago, and when I initially scanned the StubHub page for this game a few weeks back, the cheapest ticket I saw was still more than $75.

Atlantans are willing to shell out big bucks to watch the Hawks, probably because watching this team play basketball is worth every penny.

But it’ll cost you a lot of pennies to get into Philips Arena tonight.